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HSBC said today it was working with local police to find those who disrupted its online banking services with a denial of service attack, as customers complained of not being able to access their accounts. The attack was made even more painful for customers as the last Friday of the month is a traditional payday in the UK, the home of HSBC.

Little information was provided by HSBC other than a terse statement over Twitter: "HSBC UK internet banking was attacked this morning. We successfully defended our systems.

"We are working hard to restore services, and normal service is now being resumed. We apologise for any inconvenience." A spokesperson told the BBC a denial of service attack was the cause of the downtime.

A subsequent tweet revealed the police had been contacted: "HSBC is working closely with law enforcement authorities to pursue the criminals responsible for today’s attack on our Internet banking."

HSBC headquarters in Canary Wharf, London. The company has been disrupted by a DDoS, and not for the first time.

HSBC was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS), where infected machines fire an overwhelming number of data packets at a server to stop it working, most recently in 2012. That time the Anonymous hacktivist crew was believed to have carried out the hit.

Anti-DDoS provider Arbor Networks reported earlier this month that the record for DDoS power hit a new peak in 2015, hitting 500Gbps. Numerous organizations had reported attacks in the 400Gbps-500Gbps range throughout 2015, Arbor noted.